Heavyweights Call for Global-warming Probes

As scandals surrounding the flawed global-warming report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change continue to grow, new calls for investigations are turning up the heat.

A Senate report from the Environment and Public Works Committee presented Tuesday concluded that scientists at the center of the scandal now known as Climategate committed unethical and potentially criminal acts to further global-warming alarmism.

According to the report, entitled '''Consensus' Exposed: The CRU Controversy," Climategate scientists “obstructed release of damaging data and information; manipulated data to reach preconceived conclusions; colluded to pressure journal editors who published work questioning the climate science ‘consensus‘; and assumed activist roles to influence the political process.”

Republican Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, also chastised the Environmental Protection Agency for relying on the now-discredited IPCC report to make its finding that carbon dioxide was a pollutant which should be regulated. "The EPA accepted the IPCC's erroneous claims wholesale, without doing its own independent review," he said during Tuesday’s hearing, adding that he planned to ask the EPA’s Inspector General to launch an inquiry, and that the agency’s endangerment finding rested on “bad science." He also recited a long list of acknowledged flaws in the UN climate-change report.

"Climategate shows there is no consensus, that the science is far from settled, and that the Obama administration is moving ahead with a massive, job-killing tax for no good reason," Inhofe added. He is also reported to be asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation.

Senator Barbara Boxer and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson both distanced themselves from the IPCC report during the hearing, but Jackson claimed that the many flaws that have been pointed out do not undermine the underlying science behind anthropogenic (human-caused) global-warming theories.

But now, even the former chair of the IPCC is calling for an inquiry. “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying,” Professor Robert Watson, who chaired the panel from 1997 to 2002, told the Times Online in an interview. “The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”

The infamous IPCC report has come under increasing fire in the last several months as scientists and critics have pointed out error after error. After the Climategate scandal broke, several serious mistakes (or possibly lies) in the UN report were discovered and have now become known worldwide, severely tarnishing the credibility of both the panel and its report.

Glaciergate, as it has become known, is just one of them. The panel included in its report the false claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt within 25 years. Other misinformation relates to North African crop losses reaching 50 percent within 10 years. Both of those errors have now been thoroughly exposed. The Dutch government has also officially asked the IPCC to correct its erroneous claim that 55 percent of the nation was below sea level, since in reality only about 25 percent is below sea level. The panel has since admitted that it made a mistake. And these are just a few of the most blatant errors.

The movement to impose “global governance” under the guise of anthropogenic global warming appears to be losing steam as the house of cards the case was built upon begins to tumble down. Far less than half of Americans even believe in man-made global warming. But there are still major threats on the horizon — most notably, the Obama administration’s dictatorial push to use the EPA to bypass Congress and regulate plant food. So while the lies and propaganda are being exposed, the power-grabs continue.

Criminal investigations to determine whether any laws were broken would be a good place to start. Using the public’s money to lie to the public and promote more government is simply unacceptable — and judging from the Climategate e-mails, that’s exactly what happened. Investigating IPCC warming bias, as the former chairman suggests, is also a good idea; though the UN investigating itself is hardly likely to uncover serious wrongdoing.

But Americans must remain aware and continue to fight against government efforts to control everything under the guise of protecting the environment. It is a crucial battle that must be won, because the consequences of losing will be devastating to struggling families everywhere, particularly in the developing world. The economy and freedom can hardly take any more blows.

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